Item From the Past: Beaches of the Florida Panhandle

I didn't spend much time on the beach in Florida in early October 2007, when I visited WaterColor and Seaside. (See Seaside, Florida, Part 1; Goin' to the Chapel; and Last Photo Series.) Maybe part of the reason was an unwelcoming attitude on the part of municipal officials.

I found a public access path not too far away and accessed the astonishingly white beaches of northwest Florida for a few minutes, without encountering Security Enforcement. This summer, I wondered about these beaches, and how many tar balls might have found their way onto the vividly white sands in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon's noxious gift to the Gulf of Mexico.

It's hard to know exactly what has happened on exactly that small bit of the Florida coast, short of visiting in person at the right time. Check the Seaside web site and there doesn't seem to be a peep about oil, which is no surprise, since the site has a chamber of commerce vibe to it, even if no actual chamber is involved. The site's motto: More than a way of life, a way of living! Huh?

This interactive map suggests that some oil visited the 30A corridor, Florida 30A being the road that runs next to the coast in this area. It was published by ESRI to show off its GIS software. This Facebook page, The Oil Spill and South Walton/Scenic Hwy 30A, also offers some clues.

In any case, I visited the beach along Seaside three years ago.

The place certainly had its charms.

But even if I'd had a trip scheduled for this year, I would have gone. To see tar balls for myself, if there were any to be seen.

Illinois Beach State Park

No more posting until about August 22. There's much to do in the days ahead, and who knows, I might even see something worth posting about later. It's been known to happen.

We spent some time last Friday under a hot afternoon sun at Illinois Beach State Park. Besides beach, there's a lodge and some forested areas, but we went to the beach. It wasn't very crowded, which suits me. This is the beach looking north, toward the Zion Nuclear Power Station.

The plant generated electricity from the early '70s to the late '90s, but has been permanently dark in more recent years because of the risk of spawning Godzilla-like creatures to wreak havoc on Chicago... I mean, because the operator couldn't run it profitably any more. Plans now call for tearing the power station down, which is going to be one exacting brownfield reclamation project (especially if the workers uncover Godzilla-like creatures breeding in the spent-fuel pool).

The girls frolicked on the lakeshore.

I thought it was too hot to be at the beach, but I have unusual ideas about the best times to be at a beach. Mainly, when it's not hot or cold. Cloudy, no more than 75 degrees, and stiff wind blowing from offshore are more to my liking. But I managed to entertain myself even in this hotter setting. At one point, I found a pile of rocks near the edge of the land, a random jumble, and gave it a little order.

I called it BeachHenge.

Item From the Past, With Links: March 3, 1981

Spent most of today in Neal's 13-year-old station wagon. Neal drives, I navigate, Stuart catnaps in the back with our provisions. This morning we left Durham, headed east on US 64, stopping in Nashville, NC, to eat at Hardee's (egg & bacon biscuit). Then on to the coast. First we went north, through Nags Head -- saw the Atlantic Ocean proper for the first time just below Joe Justus' fishing pier, which was closed for the season -- and up to the Wright Bros. National Memorial to see their memorial and the very spot where they flew. They didn't fly far that day.

We also climbed to the top of Kill Devil Hill, where the brothers tested gliders for some years. From the top of nearby Jockey's Ridge, an enormous sand dune that we also climbed, we watched modern-day hang gliders taking advantage of the gusts blowing across the island, so strong at times that it was hard to hear each other. We were befriended by a big black dog who played with us but also chased hang gliders. We never knew whose dog it was, and it followed us part of the way as we ran down the landward side of the dune back to the station wagon.

We traveled on and by about 3:30 passed the Bodie Island lighthouse to our right (west) and continued southward along a road that sometimes seemed to be passing over nothing but water. At Hatteras Island, we found a posted ferry schedule and discovered that we could go to Ocracoke Island today, but not on to Cedar Island. Ocracoke is a narrow, 20-mile stick of an island between Hatteras and Portsmouth islands, with a small town, Ocracoke, on the SW end. The rest of the island is beach on either side of a single two-lane road.

With temps cold but not below freezing, we decided to camp a few miles from the town, arriving at the campground at about sunset. A sign at the campground said CLOSED. We drove around the chain across the parking lot entrance and soon found a site over a small hill from the parking lot, facing the Atlantic, but surrounded by small dunes to keep the wind away.

We pitched camp. That is, we threw down our sleeping bags. The lamp wouldn't light, but the camp stove did, so we prepared to cook country ham. The wind blew it out, and it wouldn't light again despite many tries. By this time it was very dark and very cold, so we ate an entire box of cookies and a bag of Doritos. We each got into our bags and had little else to do but talk and look at the stars.

Ah, the stars! The best I've ever seen. No Moon. No city lights. No tall trees. Nothing but a vault of diamonds on black, and the wispy band of the Milky Way. I'd never seen all of the Little Dipper before, ever. There they were, all of them. Picked out a number of other constellations, but only those few I could do by memory. Jupiter and Mars rose later.

Other than that, it was a long night. The ground was hard, like trying to sleep on a cold, bumpy cement mattress. It was impossible to warm up my feet. I'm pretty sure I slept, but it was broken up many times by semi-consciousness and weird dreams. I was glad, we were all glad, to see Dawn spreading her rosy fingers across the eastern sky.

Postscript, 2009. A miserable night on the beach at the time, but I remember it fondly now.

Florida Wrap

The passage of days and (especially) the changeable weather—it was cold today—are making Florida seem distant, so it’s time to wrap it up with some odds and ends.

Current events, if you pay any attention to them while traveling, take a slightly different cast somehow. You later think, “I was there when such-and-such happened.” Since we had no fewer than two TVs in our suite, one for each room, the adults in the party avoided the fate of Cartoon Network OD (and it doesn’t take much). We did not, however, avoid hearing about two hyper-covered deaths, those being of course the seriously unfortunate Terri Schiavo and the considerably more fortunate John Paul II.

I have nothing to add to the endless commentary on them. But I will note that we heard final word of the Pope’s demise not on TV, but on the radio on Saturday as we crossed the Howard Frankland Bridge, which is actually a long causeway connecting St. Petersburg with Tampa.

What’s the next Pope going to call himself? So far, I haven’t seen that question discussed by the media. But I did discover today that bookmakers have given the matter consideration.

Ft. DeSoto State Park, which is at the tip of a chain of barrier islands dangling southward from metro St. Pete, has the best beach I’ve seen in years. I don’t mean its smooth sand and long vistas, though it had those. I mean that it was practically empty, despite being such a lovely, classic beach. I read that it is a weekend destination for people who live in the area, and we avoided that mess by going on a Monday. If the air had been about 10 degrees warmer, it would have been perfect.

At the Florida Aquarium in Tampa, we saw many sea creatures, and some from the rivers and lakes of the peninsula. But none as bizarre as the leafy sea dragon, which I’d never encountered before. It was as if a sea horse were dressed up to dance at the Copa.

A catchment behind the Best Western was the place to take your pets for a walk. I know this because in front of the area a sign said DOG RUN. Also on the sign: a cartoon dog, much like the beefy mutts you might see in a Tom & Jerry cartoon, down on his (anthropomorphic) knees, front pews in a beseeching pose, cartoon sweat around his face, which said without words, Please, I gotta go!

A better sign was near a small Tampa lake I wandered by. No cartoon creatures, but it did warn that swimming in that particular body of water wasn’t safe. Why? Alligators. When I saw that, I really felt like I was in Florida.